


Over Your Own Feet

by lemonsharks



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: F/M, Missing Scene, Post-Demands of the Qun, Pre-Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-05
Updated: 2016-05-05
Packaged: 2018-06-06 13:23:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 796
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6755824
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lemonsharks/pseuds/lemonsharks
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Iron Bull loses what Adaar never had.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Over Your Own Feet

Bull sends the Chargers on ahead, back to Skyhold. Krem motions Yazali join him before the road forks; she knees her dracolisk into a trot and joins him. He watches a fixed point on the horizon between his horse’s ears, bottom lip held between his teeth, posture tight. The horse fidgets underneath him, and not just because of its draconic companion.

They stray further from the rest of the group. The spot between Yazai’s shoulderblades itches.

“I’m worried about the Chief,” he says.

“He made the right call.”

“You made the call. He froze.” Krem drops his voice, “I’ve never seen him like that.”

She hears what he does not say, the insult he won’t pay, the crease in his brow and his hold on the reins. _Watch out for him._

  


Yazali turns them homeward by way of Crestwood. They’ve demons to kill, rifts to seal, and a handful of Leliana’s people who have messages coming or going, too sensitive for ordinary ears. Bull gives each one his full attention, lobs heads off the Venatori responsible for Butcher’s life with a fatalism she has not seen in him, not recently, not after the handful of times he’d let her catch him showing off.

He does not fall in battle.

_Was that the intent?_

The high dragon casts a small, deceptive shadow over the lake and she turns them toward the water.

  


The dragon screams.

“ _That’s_ unexpected,” Blackwall says. He had seen the outline of the beast against the sky, probably thought her too far off to notice a party small as theirs. She smells burnt air and wet, trampled grass. Bull’s whoop is the first joyful thing she’s heard from him in a fortnight.

Buffets from the dragon’s wings loose her hair from its ties, knives steady in her hands. Yazali keeps to the back and sides, out of range crackling electricity, singed clothes, blades dulled with dragonfire. Solas cannot keep them swathed in silky barriers, not all at once. He casts upon himself, then ice upon the dragon, and Blackwall falls with his sword a tiny nick in the dragon’s neck.

_This was foolish_ , she thinks. Yazali twists her dagger out of the haunch and rolls away. Blood scrubs off in the wet grass, enough to get her grip back. She screams, more than an hour later, with a slash to one wing.

Bull is watching _her_ when he strikes the killing blow, when he shouts in Qunari as the dragon shrieks and falls.

  


The corpse is huge. They harvest scales and skin and wing-web, teeth and a full suit of Warden armor that had been caught inside the dragon’s throat-pouch. Leave the rest for Inquisition support. Yazali yearns for bathing, even in a cold stream or trough. The blood soaked through her hair turns it from copper to rust.

Someone _else_ can figure out what one does with _all_ the parts of a dragon. Dagna, maybe, or Harritt.

Even the requisition officer keeps her mouth shut at camp. They each take their turns with bandages and healing magic. Blackwall helps the scout throw together supper, and Yazali wets down her shirt and scrubs off best she can. She’ll need to remove the horn caps and give them a once-over with a brush–but that can wait til Skyhold.

Druffalo mill about down the hill. Bull moves in patterns among them, making less noise than he ought to in heavier armor than he usually wears. He’s working on grace, today, mimicking the dragon’s steps. He comes near to taking a chunk out of one of the druffalo, which snorts and charges off, away. The laughter, the joy in battle, in a technique perfectly executed that would have escaped him a month ago is absent.

  


_Claws and tail and teeth–ataashi._

Yazali dreams of blood and lightning, wakes covered in sweat with feathers everywhere, her mattress speared on the point of her horn. She growls, extracts her head, and pulls her pillow over her face. Shouts into the pillow until the echoes rebound from walls and mountains. It’s all waiting now–on invitations and reinforcements and news, on Josephine working her magic.

A Ferelden smith of some renown (she’s never heard of him) requests to work with the materials from the dragon. She keeps the smallest tooth, an incisor as long and wide as her thumb, because it won’t be noticed and she wants _something_ of this one day of joy bound up in a year of sorrow.

It lives inside her pocket, like a worry-stone her mother carried with her for years and years. A piece of Par Vollen so she wouldn’t forget what she made absolutely certain Yazali would never remember.

  


The Qun sends assassins for him, and Yazali will not hold her tongue.


End file.
